FANTASTIC FOUR"This is our chance to make a difference" - Sue Storm - The Invisible Woman"He's stronger than any of us but he's not stronger than all of us" - Reed Richards - Mr. Fantastic"We could these powers to help people" - Johnny Storm - The Human Torch"You can't fix this, nobody can" - Ben Grimm - The Thing

Posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012 by Peter Sciretta
While in Las Vegas for CinemaCon, I got the opportunity to sit down with director Jon Chu and chat about G.I. Joe: Retaliation. We talk about why people who didn’t like the first Stephen Sommers film Rise of Cobra should give the sequel a chance, how his vision of a GI Joe movie is more rooted in the cartoons and toys of his (and my) childhood, reinventing Cobra Commander, how he got the job, what Paramount saw in films like the Step Up series and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never to earn him a chance at a Summer action film, demystifying the movie pitching presentation process and more.

Question: How’s it going?

Jon Chu: I’m good. I’m a little exhausted, but I’m good.

Question: You started early this morning, right?

Jon Chu: We started early this morning, but I just flew in from Miami. We were doing ADR with Dwayne [Johnson] in Miami. So I flew over there and flew right back here and then we are back in the edit tomorrow.

Question: That’s crazy.

Jon Chu: It’s nuts.

Question: Well I’m going to start with the hard questions and then move our way to your favorite color.

Jon Chu: Yes! (Laughs)

Question: I liked the first movie. It’s dumb but fun.

Jon Chu: Me too,

Question: But it seems like there were a lot of people that don’t.Jon Chu: Yes.

Question: I wanted to know, why should people who hated the first film give this sequel a chance?

Jon Chu: It’s crazy, because as polarizing as that first movie was, people still went and saw it and people still went and saw it over and over and the DVD sold like crazy, so…

Question: And then you made a sequel, so they must have made money.

Jon Chu: Excatly and especially now like hearing the fans say what they want and don’t want and which characters they wish were coming back and which weren’t. I mean it seems like more people like it than people will admit, which is crazy. And we are not trying to compete with that movie, we are trying to make a different movie. To me, the GI JOE product means something very different than the filmmakers of the last movie. To me, GI JOE is this very personal thing. I grew up on GI JOES. I grew up playing GI JOES and so I have a very specific idea and it’s probably really different from people who first knew about GI JOE with the 12 inch action figure, but we really tried to bridge all of those mythologies with everything you know about Joe and put it into one. For instance, Joe Colton, one of the number one questions when I first signed on to the movie everyone would be like “Well who is playing Joe?” I’m like “What are you talking about? There is no “Joe.” Then I remembered Joe Colton and was like “That would be really awesome to give Joe a face and a personality and there’s only one iconic person that could ever play that and that would be Bruce [Willis].”

Question: Yeah, he’s perfect.

Jon Chu: I didn’t know if Bruce would ever do it, but he jumped on board and it was just perfect. So to me I think it’s just… If you loved GI JOE or if you know nothing about GI JOE and you just like a story that has ninjas and lots of things blowing up, you should give our movie a shot.

Question: As much as I liked the first film, it didn’t really feel like the GI JOE I grew up with, which I think is the same GI JOE you grew up with. Can you talk about going more in that direction?

Jon Chu: Yeah, I mean something that Lorenzo [Di Bonaventura] and I talked about very early was we wanted you to feel the power of the punch, something I was missing in the last movie, I wanted to know that these guys were really fighting. I wanted to see the scratches and patterns on patterns. Growing up, when I would play with them in my backyard, I would have these week long epic adventures and I’m convinced that’s where I learned how to tell stories and make movies, because of my toys and in those cases when a guy’s arm fell off, that was even better, because it made the story more interesting and you would lose a guy for a day and then you’d find him again and they’d appear again. So all of those things, to me, is what we tried to build into the movie, that you actually felt the world and the action; each action piece was different from the next with different textures, different fighting style, different shooting style, and so it never felt like a repeat of an action scene and that you actually revealed stuff about each character. So the way someone retreats or the way someone steps up to plate at that moment all reveals stuff about characters and even in my past movies it wasn’t about… I was never a dancer before doing dance movies, it was always about storytelling and that movement, to me, tells more story than words could ever tell and in an action movie you have more opportunities to do that.

Question: Totally. Well that’s one of the questions I wanted to get to, if you look at your credits, you’re not the person most people would expect to take on a GI JOE movie… but after seeing that five minutes I totally get it. What you did for dancing, when Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow are going at it, I get it.

Jon Chu: Thank you.

Question: Why do you think they chose you over other directors who probably had an action background? What did they see in you?Jon Chu: Well I mean I have a relationship with Paramount from when we did the Bieber movie. I didn’t know anything about Bieber. All I knew was I had a YouTube channel, so I knew what was going on online and I loved the… To me the pitch was sort of the everyman’s story, the hero’s story of a boy finding technology and having his destiny sort of fulfilled. It was a fairytale in a lot of ways. It was ROCKY in a lot of ways and we had real footage to back it up, so I think they didn’t know what the Bieber movie would be, they sort of were like “Well we don’t know, it’s just this kid…” I think what we created there they really understood and respected, that we were telling a theatrical story in there.

Question: I feel like that movie a lot of people kind of mocked and then when they saw it they were like “Wow, this is a good movie.”

Jon Chu: Even me going into it, I was like “What the heck?” Then I was like “Well let me go hang out for a second and see what the story could be before I commit” and hanging out there with him I saw the everyman, even though he’s this pop star and he can be this way or that way. He had a mom, he had a manager that was basically his brother, and his father, and all of this stuff that was really, as a storyteller, really interesting. I thought people had no idea what was actually happening, so I thought that was cool. I think my relationship with Paramount, when they saw that and we would talk about other movies and we started talking about JOE and I told them how much I loved JOE and what I thought that the JOE franchise could be in an era when we are trying to figure out what it means to be a hero and a leader in the world, for America to be a hero and a leader. What a perfect moment to redefine a brand that is along those same lines, that can help us find our way of what it means to be a hero and what it means to be a leader.

Question: Did you have to like edit a package together of what your [vision was]?

Jon Chu: I did edit some stuff together. I mean any pitch that I go into, I use images, I use music, I use video. We shoot stuff and we edit stuff together, just to communicate tone and what we would do.

Question: I feel like that’s the biggest part of the process that people that read the website don’t know anything about. I’ve recently seen a lot of that kind of stuff and these packages that are put together, really a lot of work goes into them, and no one sees it besides a few executives.

Jon Chu: It’s getting crazier and crazier, because when I first started there wasn’t like Keynote and all of this. I mean there was Power Point, but that was kind of cheesy and whatever and not everybody had a screen that you could plug into and all of that stuff, so I would do giant binders. I still have collections of folders and folders like when I see an image in a magazine I cut it out or if I see something online I put it to the side. So I have these banks of images, so when I’m going into a project, I think about what those images are and draw them out. I used to put them in these binders, so I have a shelf full of these binders for every project I’ve pitched for, things I never got and things that I did get, and now it’s just on a file, on a drive and I can just present it. Every studio has a 50 inch screen that I can just start talking and Steve Jobs it a little bit.

Question: Yeah, you can hook your iPhone right into it…

Jon Chu: And I could cut something in a night. I have a bunch of videos that I keep on file with things that I like aesthetically and then I can cut things together and communicate a lot better.

Question: Can you talk a little bit about reinventing Cobra Commander? This is the Cobra Commander I grew up with and it’s very different than the first film, so how did we get from what we saw in the first film to this?

Jon Chu: We tell that story in the movie, so you’re going to have to see the movie to fully know how that transformation is and it was difficult to find how. (Laughs)

Question: So it’s not like it just starts out like that?

Jon Chu: No, we don’t start there. We actually see how it all sort of unfolds, but it definitely is fun. That was one of the most fun challenges to figure out. I want Cobra… I freaking follow Cobra Commander on Twitter and I love all of those things and that’s iconic. There are very few villains that are as iconic as Cobra Commander, so I wanted him to be a presence in this movie. In fact, I can’t wait to see more of him in future things and what he can become, because I still think this is just the beginning of Cobra and we had a lot of fun designing the costume. Both he and Snake Eyes took months of designing, redesigning, going too far one way, then coming back, then going too far that way, so…

Question: It’s cool, because he looks like what I imagine Cobra Commander looked like in my childhood, but he doesn’t. He looks so much cooler.

Jon Chu: Yes. We had a great… Louise Mingenback, who was our costume designer, she was amazing. She doesn’t know a lot about JOE necessarily… She did all of the X MEN stuff and things like that, but she is like super high fashion, like she knows what looks good. There was always a thing back and froth between us of like what fit the comic and what she brought to the table.

Question: I have one last question for you. What’s next? What’s after GI JOE?

Jon Chu: You know, I don’t know. We are still finishing the movie right now. All of my focus is there and I’m excited. I think it will be interesting to see how the audience reacts, how they like what we do. I love action now. I’m stuck in this action adventure world, which was really fun. I love designing a world. I love creating the red ninjas and Snake Eyes and designing the vehicles and all of that. To work with a team like that was just one of the best experiences of my life, so I hope I can build another world.

Question: I hope so, too. When they were talking about the TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES short list I was expecting your name to pop up on that. I just saw that and was like “That’s the next…”

Jon Chu: (Laughs) I love TURTLES. I had the blimp with the helium in it and all of that stuff, but I know the stuff they are doing for TURTLES is really, really incredible. I can’t wait for that and to see what they do with that.

Question: Well thank you very much, Jon.

Jon Chu: Thank you. I appreciate it.

__________________I was at some diplomatic party once. Got to talking to this princess who told me that when it came to Superman, I was missing the point. She told me, "His real strength lay in his generousspiritand sense of what's fair." - King Faraday
"He’s much more of a working class superhero, which is why we ended the whole book with the image of a laboring Superman. He’s Everyman operating on a sci–fi Paul Bunyan scale." - Grant Morrison

__________________
If the person you're seeing ever asks the question "Who is Stan Lee?", promptly kick their ass to the curb.
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Who the **** makes a movie and while planning it is like, "you know what this needs...is some Greg Kinnear."

Aint It Cool News talks to director Jon M. Chu about ninjas, Cobra Commander, and leading Bruce Willis and The Rock into battle in this Summer's G.I. JOE RETALIATION!!

Published at: May 01, 2012 11:52:39 AM CDT

Hi folks, Russ Sheath from AICN Comics here and I was lucky enough to spend some time talking with Jon M. Chu, director of the upcoming G.I. Joe Retaliation.

First off, I’ve got to say that its easy to tell that Jon Chu ‘gets’ G.I. Joe. Starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Bruce WIllis, G.I. Joe Retaliation is this summers sequel to 2009’s Rise of Cobra, a movie that while commercially successful, was met with a less enthusiastic response from both critics and fans of the 30 year old mythos.

The reaction to G.I. Joe Retaliation however, has been nothing short of remarkable. With each successive trailer and image checking all the right boxes for fans and ‘civilian’ movie goers alike, all indications point towards this being the movie G.I. Joe followers have been waiting to see.

Snake-Eyes with no lips? Check.

Cobra Commander looking like the terrorist leader we all know and loathe? Check.

Great visual effects, epic action and ninjas fighting on the side of a mountain? Check.

Two of the biggest, most charismatic movie stars on the planet? Check and check again.

There’s no doubting that G.I .Joe is reloaded, breathing new life into a franchise that had stumbled when it was barely out of the stalls. Retaliation proves a grittier, dirtier and more realistic Joe - ready for battle.

With Johnson, a global superstar of screen and wresting, reveling in his new found reputation as ‘franchise viagra’ and Bruce Wills being...well...Bruce Willis, the question on everyones lips is: "Who is the film’s director, Jon M. Chu?'

With nine movies to his name including Justin Bieber: Never Say Never and 2008’s Step Up 2: The Streets, there’s no doubting Jon Chu’s experience as a director - but you may be forgiven for exercising ‘the peoples eyebrow’ when he was announced as the vision behind an action adventure movie, let alone a summer tentpole franchise such as G.I. Joe.

Despite the obvious pressure of helming this new vision of the G.I. Joe universe, Chu appears naturally at ease, proving endlessly enthusiastic about his role as gatekeeper into the cinematic world of G.I. Joe. Chu discusses his task with authority, in a way assuring you that he is not only respectful of the source material, but is also a fan.

Talking about the relationship between Snake Eyes and Scarlett, Cobra Island and the potential difficulties of introducing Serpentor to the Joe universe, Chu describes the mythos in a way that you don’t get from a ‘G.I. Joe 101’ lesson one afternoon at a toy manufacturer. You get it from a ‘relationship’ with the source material.

I spoke to Jon Chu, and as a huge G.I. Joe fan, I could have happily talked for much longer about story telling, his love for the source material, and his vision for the future of G.I. Joe.

Sadly, the first few minutes of our conversation were lost in the transatlantic static (Cobra scrambling?), but I began with congratulating Jon on the reaction that G.I. Joe Retaliation has received so far.

I asked Jon about how he came to direct GI Joe Retaliation and how that translated from a background in dance and music films.

Explaining that he doesn’t have a dance background but is rather a story teller, Chu said that he regarded action movies, much like his movies about dance and music, are all about movement.

The static unscrambled, I asked Jon: What are the challenges when shifting onto a production that is so much larger and more complex than the films he has previously been involved in?

Jon Chu (JC): There’s a lot of action sequences. It’s been a fun thing to learn with explosions and things that I’ve never worked with before. Thats all logistics, we have a great crew and they really helped me, but all it came down to once the camera was turned on, was the actors and that lens. That’s what we really focused on.

There’s a lot of action sequences, and you are dealing with things like safety issues on a huge set where you have 600 people waiting for your next call and you have actors waiting to fill their part of the story. There’s a lot of companies involved. That was a challenge.

Everyone pretty much from the beginning of this movie agreed on the type of movie we were making and what we were trying to do with it and that made everything a lot smoother.

Russ Sheath (RS): What genres interest you the most, can you see yourself trying different things in the future?

JC: Right now I love and I’m addicted to the action-adventure movie. We are literally creating a world, and as a story teller its the first time I’ve done this from the ground up. I’ll be playing around in this world for a bit and we’ll see what happens. Of course I want to try all different kinds of genre.

RS: Can you shed some light on what your priorities were to ‘fix’, if thats the correct term, from the first movie?

JC: You know, It was never about fixing, for me it was all about doing ‘our’ version. The thing about G.I. Joe is that it’s reinvented over and over again, sort of like Batman or Spider-Man, in a way.

What were the Joes that I always wanted? I wanted people to ‘feel the punch’ and ‘feel the power of the punch’ in this movie. These guys get hurt, they get scratches and they have wear and tear to them.

They aren’t just a group, each one is an individual. I always loved that each one had a different personality. Snake Eyes had one personality, Roadblock had another. Flint had another. Duke had another, and each one had their own flaws and ways to ‘get there’.

G.I. Joe is about gadgets and vehicles, but at the core...and why I love this world...it’s about human beings being leaders and heroes. It was about human choices, and doing the right thing, and doing the hard thing, and that was something we really tried to focus on in this movie.

It’s defining what it takes to be a hero and leader in your class, in your city, in your country, and in the world at a time when...what it means to be a leader is being questioned all around the world. It’s a great question to explore.

Thats why Bruce plays a big part in the movie - he teaches these guys that it’s not from the outside-in, but being a soldier is from the inside-out. It’s about being a human being, and not being a soldier.

Of course, high flying ninjas and crazy fights were always going to be part of it.

I wanted, obviously, humor - and it doesn’t take it self too seriously. But at the same time, as a kid, I did believe these guys were real. I did believe they were really shooting, and I did believe that we had enemies like that. So, I really wanted that ‘in between’ aspect of it not being ‘so’ fantasy. They are real human beings, and they are just like you....just bigger than you.

RS: Can you give us something to look out for or that the fans might not be aware of, as yet?

JC: We are having a lot of fun with Cobra ‘being’ the Joes in this version. As you know, the multi-media aspect of movies now means the story doesn’t begin and end in the movie, it actually can begin way before...online...and can continue afterwards. We have stuff going on that you should be looking out for online such as the ‘Cobra Special Forces’ site, its all part of our goal.

We have a lot of little things that I don’t want to spoil, other than to look out for them.

Maybe there’s some Cobra cover companies, maybe there are characters that we are setting up here who come back in a different form. Definitely there’s some things in there which may seem like ‘nothing in this movie, but they have a purpose!

RS: Can you shed some light on the much discussed ‘Cobra Commander Conundrum’ - which admittedly sounds like an episode of The Big Bang Theory? Is that Rex who end up wearing the Cobra Commander suit, in the movie?

JC:I don’t know where all this crazy, speculative stuff came from. We were asked the question, Lorenzo [di Bonaventura, Producer) and I at Toy Fair...

‘Is that the same actor’?

I was like...

‘No, its not the same actor’.

‘Is that Joseph Gordon Levitt?’

‘No, it is not!’

But it is Rex!

We are continuing that story, there is no other Cobra Commander. We can put that rumor to rest. I was waiting for this moment to finally clarify, I’m glad you asked that.

RS: How was it bringing together Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Bruce Willis?

JC: That was insane! I never thought it would happen. Bruce and Dwayne, the legend and the icon together, in one frame and then you throw in Snake Eyes right next to them, that was pretty insane. They had a lot of fun, we were trying to keep up with them and keep the camera rolling. The things they would riff off were just hilarious. They had a great time.

RS: This is a question that you may not want to answer for fear of a SPOILER. Will we be seeing the demise of characters like Duke, or will there be the opportunity for him to come back?

JC: All I can say is: you should always expect the unexpected in the G.I. Joe. ALWAYS expect the unexpected.

Did you put the actors through a boot camp to learn about being soldiers?

JC: We worked with Harry Humphries, who was a SEAL, and we bought in a bunch of SEALS to our movie to help guide our actors and myself. So it was like ‘OK, we need to get the actors from here...to here...and then to the nuclear warhead. How would they do it’?

They would give us all the jargon and all the actions. They would, literally, choreograph that. The actors really leaned on them about how to say things correctly, and even now we are still working with them with extra dialogue and stuff. We are doing ADR and adding more and more.

RS: Do you have any favorite story lines from the G.I. Joe comic book?

JC: I always loved the relationship between Snake-Eyes and Scarlett. That love story was like Romeo and Juliet. We are planting a lot of seeds for the audience who don’t know how ninjas and the military exist in one world...with a guy in a silver mask...we have to set things up. There’s plenty of things. Cobra Island, I wouldn’t necessarily get into the Serpentor arena, but....

RS: If there’s an opportunity to return for G.I. Joe 3 would you be keen to helm that movie (should it come about?)

JC: I had a great time on this movie, and we are still finishing it up and focusing on that. For me, we are building a world...and the beginning of a world...and there’s so much more in the G.I. Joe universe we can add and if you build the foundation. We can go anywhere.

A massive thank you to Jon Chu for his time this afternoon. Follow Jon on Twitter and GI Joe Retaliation's Twitter is HERE.

GI Joe Retaliation is released on 29th June 2012 in the US and Canada and 8th August 2012 in the UK

Thanks to Justin from @generalsjoes and to Justin P for questions input.

So Cobra Commander is still Rex Lewis just with a different costume, actor and voice. That's good news in my book

__________________
"Nazi zombies don’t wanna eat you just ‘cause they’re craving the protein. They do it ‘cause…they do it ‘cause they hate Americans, man. Talibans. They’re the Talibans of the zombie world." thanks TheNextNolan22 for reminding me how awesome Badger is

So Cobra Commander is still Rex Lewis just with a different costume, actor and voice. That's good news in my book

Actually, in another interview, he specifically says that it's not the same character under the mask:

Quote:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is not in this movie. Under the mask, is this the same character that Levitt played?

No. [Smiling] But we figured out a way that's pretty nice. And you get the Cobra Commander that you've always wanted. Or, to me, what I always wanted: a bad-ass villain. He's one of the most iconic villains ever. I'm even following him on Twitter -- he's so funny.

I still don't have faith with Jon Chu, like hello he directed Step Up 2 and Step Up 3D and I hated those movies.

But I hope this one is gonna be better than the 1st one. I also hope that this movie will at least get $150 million in the domestic box-office so there would be a sequel.

__________________

FANTASTIC FOUR"This is our chance to make a difference" - Sue Storm - The Invisible Woman"He's stronger than any of us but he's not stronger than all of us" - Reed Richards - Mr. Fantastic"We could these powers to help people" - Johnny Storm - The Human Torch"You can't fix this, nobody can" - Ben Grimm - The Thing

It won't be hard since the first movie was trash. But meh, I don't know about The Rock as Roadblock being the leader. Also still staying with a stupid character and storyline like Rex Commander who is terrible.